11 Best PPC Strategies to Improve ROI for Paid Advertising Campaigns

PPC advertising, in recent years, has gained immense popularity as one of the most profitable strategies to cash online opportunities and climb the ladder to heightened ROI. According to the statistics collected from an infographic put forth by Wordstream, when web surfers are actually looking to purchase, 64% of the people clearly intending to buy click on sponsored results (paid results) as compared to the rest 35% who rely on organic links.

However, to most of the PPC professionals, launching a well structured PPC campaign that turns up successful in achieving outstanding results is a daunting task. Since paid advertising campaigns eat up almost the entire online marketing budget, the pressure on PPC experts to pull greater returns on investment is always high. So, here in this post I’ve compiled a pretty good list of 11 PPC strategies that will turn your PPC marketing campaign into a successful one.

Did you ever wonder why most of your target audience walks past your ad without clicking? This is because of a poor ad copy that fails to show its worth by not including “critical” information that your target customers are seeking. A good ad copy is the one that includes critical information that attracts eyeballs and pulls high quality traffic to the landing page.

Let’s take an example of Tourmyindia.com, an online platform that sells India touring packages across the globe. Below is a screenshot of the ad copy that shows up when “holiday package to goa” is searched on Google

Note the critical things that Tour My India included in its ad copy to make it clickworthy

An attractive title that is self-explanatory – 4D/3N Holidays in Goa, the title itself tells complete information about the deal.

Eye-catchy “call to action” text to grab attention– “Get upto 50% off on Goa Holiday Packages. Book Now Offer Limited” – This text indicates 50% discount that is likely to lure customers while prompting lookers to take instant action by using “Book Now Offer Limited” phrase.

Most of the online businesses use their website’s homepage as landing page in their PPC campaigns. Due to this, paid marketing campaigns fail terribly and often business owners end up incurring huge losses. To avoid this, always create dedicated landing pages and optimize them for conversions so as to ensure maximum returns. It is extremely important to keep your landing pages as simple as possible by putting a check on your PPC efforts and coming up with something that can influence customers purchasing decision

Example – Below is a screenshot (only the part above the fold), again from Tourmyindia.com depicting a highly optimized landing page specifically designed for the PPC campaign – “holiday tours to Goa”.

Geotargeting allows one to target ads to a very specific location. This benefits product based companies to sell their items to a geographically targeted niche while stopping ads to trigger for the locations that the campaign doesn’t wish to target.

A good example of this can be an ecommerce store (let’s say XYZ) that ships its products only to one state, say California only. Now obviously, if your PPC ads show up even when somebody sitting in London searches to buy something online, it’s likely that the person would click on it only to find that you ship only to California and leave frustrated. There you lose your dollars – your ad spend, despite gaining a genuinely interested visitor.

Hence, while setting up the campaign, it’s wise to fill fields/options like “Search”, “Browse by Country”, “Bundles“, “Excluding” and custom Geotargeting via entering multiple zip codes or drawing out a map.

As per Google, adding negative keywords is the best thing that you can do to your PPC campaign to reach out to the most interested customers that are looking for your product/service while reducing costs at the same time. Now, many of you might be wondering what a negative keyword is. A negative keyword is the one that you enter into an ad campaign so as to stop your ad from showing up when that particular search term is used. This minimizes wasted spend by eliminating irrelevant searches. To create negative keywords, you can simply put a minus (-) sign in front of your keyword phrases.

The outcomes of inserting negative keywords in your PPC campaign include – more targeted traffic, increased CTR, higher Google Quality Score, less wasted ad spend(reduced average CPC) and more conversions.

5.Good Formatting Matters – Create ads with text that is easily “understandable” to even an 8 yr old kid.

Format your ad properly before going live. Don’t include any semi colons and write the ad text that is easier enough to read & understand by anyone.

6.Try Dayparting – Choose the best display time for your PPC ad to optimize your campaign for “convertible” traffic

Dayparting is basically a technique that allows one to choose timeframes when their ads should be displayed. With Google adwords, you can select the exact hour while with adcenter; you can also select blocks of timeframes like 12 p.m to 4 a.m or any other duration within which you won’t like to display your ad.

For every PPC campaign that you plan, connect your adwords account with Google Analytics and track conversions real-time by inserting the analytic code into your targeted PPC landing page(inside your HTML coding). This will show you the gap between your CTR and actual conversions, which is very important to measure the performance of your campaign.

From landing pages to ad formats, ad titles and ad copies; you should split test everything to see which combination gives you best results. If you’re confused between two variations of a landing page, perform A/B testing procedure to pre-measure the impact and fix flaws.

Don’t forget testing the below three things in your PPC campaign to determine what will resonate best with your audience-

1.Test landing page call to actions for higher conversions

Wording, size, color and placement of your CTA matters a lot in converting traffic through a landing page.

Headline is the first thing that grabs eyeballs & that’s why it leaves the biggest impact on CTR. Before you carry out the above two tests, consider testing a headline first. Again, construct an attractive headline that covers useful information and prompts people to click through your ad. Missed impressions will lead to a lower Quality Score.

Here’s how you can determine your Quality Score using ad rank and CPC bid metrics.

Image credit – Wordstream

9.Manage your PPC account twice a week

Optimizing your PPC campaign at least two days a week is important especially if you have a marketing budget > $3000 per month. However, depending on the size of your Google Adwords account, you can yourself decide how often your campaigns need optimization.

Below, I’ve shared the PPC Account Management Process via an image that shows some important aspects involved in managing a campaign effectively.

Employing bid management strategies reduce overall costs to a great extent by adjusting bids in sync with the calculated metrics. Some of the PPC tools that you can use to plan an effective strategy are – SEMRush, Ubersuggest, classic Google Keyword Planner, PPC Campaign Builder, Visual Thesaurus etc to save your time.

For those businesses that’ve a limited budget, maximize your PPC efforts on branded keywords rather than general keywords. It is important to bid only on those keywords which are likely to generate maximum conversions for you.

For example – If your display campaigns don’t perform well and fail to generate conversions despite spending $25-$30 per day, add this budget to a campaign that is losing impressions due to “limited budget”.

The Final Verdict

If you pay $20 for a click and the click in turn closes a sale > $20, only then you can be sure that your PPC campaign is well-structured and running smooth enough to expect that you’ll end up with greater ROI than what you invested. So, don’t just read these PPC strategies, take action and turn your paid marketing campaign into a huge success. If you need help, hire our Google Adwords certified PPC experts who have 10+ yrs of experience in putting up an effective PPC campaign.